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Foreword to This Edition

“The greatest effort of the government must tend toward teaching citizens the art of doing without its help.” —II, p. 900, note n.

Tocqueville is a classic, an author who meets Sainte-Beuve’s definition of a classic, by providing “a conversation for every instance, a friendship that does not fail and will never desert you, and that offers that familiar sensation of serenity and amenity which reconciles us, as we frequently need, with other men and ourselves.”¹ As befits his status as a classic author, hundreds of books and articles have been published in recent decades about Tocqueville, and dozens of editions of Democracy in America are printed and reprinted in the world every year.

How do you read a classic?

Stendhal defined a novel in The Red and the Black as “a mirror that is strolled along a main road.” The same can be said of great books in general. They provide a new reflection of ourselves every time we read them, and they accompany us as we move forward in life. Tocqueville himself always traveled with the books he considered the greatest: works by Pascal, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, classics he read and read again all his life.

His favorite authors were few and old. He wrote to a friend:

Not being able to bring my library here to keep me company, I have had me sent at least one volume from each of the great authors I like. I

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think they are no more than twenty-five. They all fit in a very small shelf. Almost none of them were written less than a century ago.²

Tocqueville had little patience for the books written by his contemporaries and maintained that he could find in a “small number of excellent books that … keep good company,”³ and within himself, all he needed to generate his own works.⁴

Democracy in America is arguably Tocqueville’s greatest and most enduring work. Drawing on his nine-month journey with Beaumont to the United States and influenced by the “classic” authors he carried with him as well as by his own vision, Tocqueville constructed a unique portrait of America. The very first paragraph of the working manuscript’s introduction calls attention to his project’s novelty:

The work that you are about to read is not a travelogue, <the reader can rest easy>. I do not want him to be concerned with me. You will also not find in this book a complete summary of all the institutions of the United States; but I flatter myself that, in it, the public will find some new documentation and, from it, will gain useful knowledge about a subject that is more important for us than the fate of America and no less worthy of holding our attention.⁵

Rejecting the form of a travelogue, Tocqueville also wrote to his friend Ampère that he did not want to write a description of America, but rather

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a mirror—perhaps the mirror Stendhal describes—in which the readers might see themselves.⁶

For more than a century and a half, Americans and Europeans have been observing their own shifting images in Tocqueville’s mirror.⁷ The image is repeatedly distorted, and the aim of the exercise is far from being disinterested. We are continually rereading Democracy in America, never quite reaching final conclusions about it, or about Tocqueville’s position.⁸ With each reading, we find something new and valuable in the book, and with each reading, we continue to recognize ourselves anew in its pages.

Ortega y Gasset claimed that great books have the qualities of simultaneously being deficient and exuberant.⁹ As a means of understanding the author and his intentions, they are always something of a failure, as we can never truly say we wholly comprehend either the writer or the writer’s mind. At the same time, they seem to be an inexhaustible treasure trove in which we always find something that we hadn’t stumbled upon before and that the author was unaware of having had the intention to say. It is in this sense that classic books are never completed, finished, or fully read, since they always seem to have something new to say.

Over a century and a half after Democracy in America’s publication, this non-travelogue continues to captivate us, and we continue to travel down the main road of modern democracy with Tocqueville’s book in our hands.¹⁰

Traveling, roads, and trips; these are all very Tocquevillian things.¹¹

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Tocqueville enjoyed traveling, but did it in his own peculiar way. Beaumont writes about Tocqueville:

A day lost or a day poorly spent were a bad day. The smallest waste of time annoyed him. He brought this passion in his travels up to the point that he never arrived in a place without previously having secured the means to leave it, which made one of his friends say that he always left before he had arrived.¹²

When Tocqueville could not travel, his favorite pastime was reading travel books, particularly if they had pictures or maps.¹³ His interest in travel and travel literature is not entirely surprising; the images of travel—the journey, roads, movement, rivers, intersections—are frequently employed by Tocqueville.

He understood history as a sort of voyage, the inexorable advance of equality of conditions. Yet, equality could assume two guises: an equality consistent with freedom, or an equality compatible with despotism. America showed the promise of the first road, as well as the dangers of the second. When Tocqueville wrote his book, both paths seemed possible for France.

“One has to be at the breaking point, as we find ourselves,” he explains to his friend Beaumont about the epoch they lived in, “in order to see both roads distinctively.”¹⁴

If travel was one of Tocqueville’s preoccupations, liberty was another. He wrote to John Stuart Mill in June 1835: “I love liberty by penchant, and equality by instinct and reason. These two passions that so many fake, I believe I really feel within myself, and I am ready to make great sacrifices for them.”¹⁵

It is not surprising that he also viewed liberty as a kind of voyage or

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journey. Liberty is as much a process as a condition; it is the result of a never-ending process of discussion, debate, redefinition, movement, and change. No fixed or stable definition of it will ever be possible, and although the many manifestations of freedom share certain characteristics, freedom can never be completely uniform, for it is shaped by its context and by the individuals who exercise it. As Tocqueville observed, “I would regard it as a great misfortune for humankind if liberty, in all places, had to occur with the same features.”¹⁶

Significantly, it is while traveling, while sailing aboard the Havre to America that Tocqueville finds a perfect example of liberty.

At sea, if you don’t want to quarrel, one must be the best of friends to everyone. There is no in-between. … The obligation of living one on top of the other and of seeing each other closely establishes a lack of discretion and a liberty for which there is no idea on land. Here, everyone acts in the middle of the multitude as if one were alone. Some read in loud voice, others play, others sing. Some write, as myself right now, while next to me a neighbor dines. Everyone drinks, eats, or cries as he wishes. Our rooms are so narrow that we exit them to dress, and except for ostensibly getting in our briefs, I don’t know what part of our dressing up doesn’t take place in the face of Israel. In a word, we live here on the public square, as the ancients. This is the real country of liberty, but it can only take place between four planks. That’s the problem.¹⁷

Recreating liberty on land poses more difficulties, but liberty remained the ultimate value for Tocqueville. He did not, however, believe he could simply present American democracy as a model to be imitated elsewhere. Equality was the same all over the world, but liberty had many facets.

The greatness and enduring worth of Democracy in America lies, to a large extent, in the fact that Tocqueville understood that the movement that carried the modern world toward democratic regimes was a universal trend not limited by continents or traditions. Thus, it would be wrong to

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think that he was simply writing about nineteenth-century America and France.¹⁸

That general process of equality’s movement linked the two shores of the Atlantic. Tocqueville asserted that America was not a new country, and he realized that Europe itself simultaneously became a continent when America developed into one.¹⁹ They were both different sides of the same reality. Tocqueville writes:

I cannot agree to separate America from Europe, despite the Ocean that divides them. I consider the people of the United States as the portion of the English people charged with exploiting the forests of the New World, while the rest of the nation, provided with more leisure and less preoccupied by the material cares of life, is able to devote itself to thought and to develop the human mind in all aspects.

[<≠So I think that democracy must no more be judged by America than the different nations of Europe by one of the commercial and manufacturing classes that are found within them.≠>]²⁰

This is why Tocqueville refused to say that the United States was a new society. On the contrary, it was old and had all the advantages of experience and history without the burdens and difficulties of infancy. “In the United States, society has no childhood; it is born in manhood,”²¹ he wrote. America had existed long before the first pilgrims had arrived on its shores. It was an idea, a project, before it became a continent:

It was not necessity that forced them [the Puritans] to abandon their country; there they left a social position worthy of regret and a secure livelihood. Nor did they come to the New World in order to improve their situation or to increase their wealth; they tore themselves from the comforts of their homeland to obey a purely intellectual need. By exposing themselves to

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the inevitable hardships of exile, they wanted to assure the triumph of an idea.²²

What set apart the Europeans in America from the Europeans in Europe²³ was that, on the American continent, ideas could swiftly become real and possible.²⁴ Americans were able to bring to life the Europeans’ dreams. The inhabitants of America traveled lightly toward the future, while Europeans advanced slowly because they had to carry with them their heavy past. As Tocqueville put it: “Admirable position of the New World where man has only himself as an enemy. To be happy and free, he only has to want to be.”²⁵

This explains why Americans had arrived first, before the rest of the world, at the final stage of the development of equality; that is, democracy.²⁶ Only the combination of the uncommon origin of the Americans, their high degree of intellectual development, their lack of aristocracy, the power of local government and associations, and the exceptional geographical conditions, among others, allowed for the existence of this ultimate form of political organization.

Had American democracy been exclusively the result of some exceptional and unrepeatable physical conditions, Europe would have had no

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chance to move toward democratic regimes and perhaps the American example would have been less interesting to Tocqueville.²⁷

With these circumstances not existing in Europe, there the actions of intellectuals, mores, and laws were going to be crucial in bringing about and maintaining democracy and in educating citizens.²⁸ Yet, as is well known, the advance of democratic equality did not mean that America and Europe were necessarily moving toward a free democracy. In fact, many signs told Tocqueville that liberty might not be the obvious result of the democratic revolution.²⁹

All this adds to the difficulty of reading Tocqueville.

We find in Democracy a confusing mix of America, Europe, France, United States, the ideal of a free democratic system, and the description of democratic despotism. It’s not easy to find out when Tocqueville is referring to one or the other. This is why it is possible to make Tocqueville say all kinds of different and opposite things and frequently be misquoted.³⁰

Democracy in America contains all of the institutional, historical, and theoretical elements that we associate with and expect in classic liberalism, such as division of powers, rights, freedom of the press, and sovereignty of the people. But it would be a mistake to look in the book for an organized and perfectly structured set of theoretical and institutional solutions for a liberal democracy. Tocqueville himself consciously attempted not to write that way. As he explained to a friend:

I believe that the books that have made men think the most and have had the greatest influence on their opinions and actions are those in which the author hasn’t attempted to tell them dogmatically what had to be thought, but rather those where he has placed their minds on the road that goes

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toward the truths, and has made them find these, as if it were, by themselves.³¹

Approach Democracy in America keeping in mind that its author’s aim was to require the reader to add and complete his book, as all classic books require, to carry it with you as a kind of travel mirror.

Read Tocqueville as Flaubert recommended reading in general to Mademoiselle de Chantepie: “Don’t read as children read, to amuse yourself; or how ambitious people do, for your instruction. No. Read to live.”³²

Eduardo Nolla

Madrid, April 2011

Note on Volumes and Pagination

Although this English edition is printed in two volumes and the Liberty Fund bilingual edition comprises four, page numbers in both editions are identical.

The Spanish translation published by Trotta in Madrid in one volume also uses the same pagination.

E. N.